Diffusion of Information and Role of Individual Prevension Efforts on Epidemic Spread

In this work, the spread of a contagious disease on a society where the individuals may take precautions is modeled. The primary assumption is that the infected individuals transmit the infection to the susceptible members of the community through direct contact interactions. In the meantime, the susceptibles gather information from the neighboring sites which may lead to taking precautions. The SIR model [1] is used for the diffusion of infection while the Bass equation [2] models the information diffusion. The sociological classification [3] of the individuals indicates that small percentage of the population take action immediately after being informed, while the majority expect to see some concrete advantage of taking action. The individuals are assumed to take two different precautions. The precursory measures are getting vaccinated or trying to avoid direct contact with the neighbors. A weighted average of states of the neighbors leads to the choice of action.
The fully connected and Scale-free Networks [5, 4] are employed as the underlying network of interactions. The comparison between the pure contagion diffusion and the diffusion of infection in a responsive society showed that a very limited precaution makes a considerable difference in the speed and the size of the spread of illness. The advantage of the human intervention method is that no prior knowledge of the network is necessary [6]. Notably, highly connected hub nodes play an essential role in the reduction of the spread of disease.